Specialty/Research Focus

Dr. Whittaker is Professor and Chair in the Department of Civil,
Structural, and Environmental Engineering at the University at
Buffalo (UB) and is Director of the NSF-funded NEES facility that
is housed in the Department. He is the President of the
Consortium of Universities for Research in
Earthquake Engineering (CUREE), which is a not-for-profit
corporation in the United States. The CUREE membership
includes 26 research universities and 280+ affiliated faculty. He
has served as President of the organization since 2005. Dr.
Whittaker has led the development of numerous
multi-campus, multidisciplinary proposals including the
recently funded, $30M USD NEHRP Consultants Joint
Venture, which is a joint venture of CUREE and the Applied
Technology Council. He developed and now leads the University
of Buffalo involvement in three Indefinite Delivery Indefinite
Quantity (IDIQ) contracts with US federal agencies on topics
related to blast engineering and infrastructure protection; the
lead organizations for the IDIQ contracts are CUBRC and Black
and Veatch. Dr. Whittaker served as a member of the Board of
Directors for the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI)
from 2008-2010, and currently serves on the Board of Directors for
the World Seismic Safety Initiative (WSSI) and the Advisory
Committee of the Southern California Earthquake Center.